All In The Golden Afternoon
by Alchemist Experiment
Summary: There was light in the afternoons. Golden, vibrant, brilliant light. He wore it like a suit, and it was the only bright thing in her world. NoaxEd


_Disclaimer: Not mine, not making any money off of this._

_Warnings: Spoilers for full series and movie._

All In the Golden Afternoon

_What I tell you three times is true._

The city was gray. Even when the sun shone, the drab and dreary air of the city dissolved it into a cinerious film. Here and there was a splash of red or blue, but it was muted and strained. Shadows stretched and gripped even in early afternoon. The stones of buildings were the stones of crypts, greige and ominous.

It was a dying place.

Death crept up from the cobblestones, lingering and wasting. Death slipped between the cracks of doors, like diseased mice in search of sustenance. It was as though a fog of mortality and sickness held the city in its grip. There was no light. There was no life. There was nothing but a lingering, wasting stretch of death in strained sepia hues.

But in the small flat above the flower shop, the weak strains of the afternoon sun filtering in through the dingy windows, there was one bit of brightness. Beneath the muted dust motes, golden hair shone brightly like a beacon.

Afternoons were quiet. Edward sat, hunched over the table, his hand moving furiously as he scribbled his strange symbols. He captured the light, calling it to him, illuminating himself in this cramped space that leaked death and despair from the walls. He didn't speak. He didn't drink his tea or acknowledge the plate of biscuits at his elbow. He only wrote, lost in some place inside his mind. But he glowed. His eyes burned like saffron, narrowed in concentration. His skin was flushed and alive and stained with blush. He was alive amongst the death, one single beacon in a cemetery of walking corpses.

She could watch him for hours. Sitting across the room, her feet tucked beneath her thighs, she could watch him forever. There was a burning inside of him that stretched out, reaching out from his skin and enveloping him in light. He didn't belong to this place. He moved through it like a single red leaf in winter, out of place and eye-catching. He came from somewhere bright and full of life, and he had brought a taste of it with him. She wanted that.

She wanted him.

In the golden afternoon, the quiet time when Ed wrote and filled the little room with his life and his colour, she went to him. She slipped her arms around his neck and pressed her lips against his temple. He stiffened under her touch, and the vibrant glow around him seemed to shrink. It drew back and in, sinking back within him, draining to some place she couldn't reach.

"No," he said, softly.

"Please?"

He was warm in her arms. He was so warm and this place was so cold and she had never wanted anything this strongly before in her life. She clung to him, yearning for his color and his life. She could feel it beneath his skin.

"No," he said again, shaking his head softly. She did not let go. She nestled her face in the crook of his shoulder and tightened her arms about him as though she could share in all that made him _him_.

"Please," she repeated, because she had no other word. Not now.

"No." And the third time was the last time he would say it, and she knew that. "I can't." He didn't speak with anger, but a small and sad note of regret. His words were choked and dry and brittle, and she released him and stepped back. The sun had sank below the window panes now, and what light there now was had grown shadowed and hushed. And he sat at the table, his hands still on the surface, and now even he looked gray and dim and dead.

He turned to her, slowly, and his hair fell across his shoulder in a fleeting glimmer of goldenrod brilliance. Then it was gone, and all was dull once more, even his eyes. In the dim, they were amber seen through smoked glass. He looked tired and old beyond his years, and his eyes were looking at some place beyond her and beyond Munich and perhaps beyond Germany itself.

"I'm sorry," he said, and he stood and gathered his papers and retreated to his bedroom, leaving her alone in the cold and muted sepia-hued kitchen.

She stood watching after him until all the light was gone.


End file.
